Instead of “algebra” or “geometry,” the woman in the chair smiled and said, “I’m writing a market trend summary to present at the next board of directors meeting—one that I hope will convince them to let me expand our private label merchandise. Department stores,” she explained when he looked genuinely interested, “particularly stores like Bancroft’s, make a large profit from selling merchandise with their own labels on it, but we’re not taking full advantage of it the way Neiman’s and Bloomingdale’s and some of the others have.”
As he had been last week at lunch, Matt was instantly intrigued by this business persona of hers, partially because it was in such contrast to the other images he’d had of her in the past. “Why haven’t they taken advantage of it?” he asked. Several hours later, when their discussion had ranged from Bancroft’s merchandising to its financial operations, to its problems with product liability and expansion plans, Matt was no longer merely intrigued, he was impressed as hell with her . . . and, in a crazy way, extremely proud of her.
Sitting across from him, Meredith was vaguely aware of having somehow earned his approval, but she was so wrapped up in their discussion, so awed by his instantaneous grasp of complicated concepts, she’d lost all track of time. The page she’d been writing on was now filled with notes she’d made about his suggestions, suggestions that she was eager to think about further. His last suggestion, however, was out of the question. “We’d never be able to pull that off,” she explained when he urged her to look into buying their own clothing production facilities in Taiwan or Korea.
“Why not? Owning your own facilities would eliminate all your problems with quality control and loss of consumer confidence.”
“You’re right, but I couldn’t possibly afford it. Not now and not in the near future.”
His brow furrowed at her apparent lack of understanding. “I’m not suggesting you use your own money! Borrow it from the bank—that’s what bankers are for,” he added, forgetting for the moment that her fiancé was a banker. “Bankers lend you your own money when they’re certain that what you’re borrowing it for is a sure thing, then they charge you interest for borrowing it back from them—and when the loans are paid off, they tell you how lucky you are to have them taking risks on you. You surely know how that works by now.”
Meredith burst out laughing. “You remind me of my friend Lisa—she’s not very impressed with my fiancé’s profession. She thinks Parker ought to just give me the money whenever I need it without insisting on the usual collateral.”
Matt’s smile faded a little at the reminder of her fiancé’s existence, and then it turned to shock when she added lightly, “Believe me, I’m becoming an expert on commercial borrowing. Bancroft’s is borrowed out, and so am I, to be honest.”
“What do you mean, so are you?”
“We’ve been expanding very rapidly. If we go into a mall that’s being developed by someone else, the costs go down but so do the profits, so we usually develop the mall ourselves, then lease part of it out to other retailers. It costs a fortune to do that, and we’ve been borrowing the money for it.”
“I understand, but what does that have to do with you personally?”
“It takes collateral to get loans,” she reminded him. “Bancroft and Company has already put up all the collateral it has, as well as the actual stores, of course. The corporation ran out of collateral when we built the store in Phoenix. I wanted to go into New Orleans and Houston, so I’m putting the stocks and property in my trust fund up for collateral. I’ll be thirty in a week, and the trust my grandfather set up for me comes under my control then.”
She saw him scowl and hastily added, “There’s no reason to be concerned. The New Orleans store has been easily able to make the payments on its loan, just as I knew it would. So long as the store can make its payments, I have nothing to worry about.”
Matt was utterly dumbstruck. “You’re not telling me that in addition to putting up your own things as collateral, you’ve also personally guaranteed that loan for the New Orleans store?”
“I had to,” she explained calmly.
Matt tried, with incomplete success, not to sound like an irate professor lecturing a backward student from his lofty podium of superior knowledge. “Never do that again,” he warned her. “Never, ever put your own money up for a business deal. I told you, that’s what banks are for. They make the profit on the interest, let them take the risk. If business were to fall off, and the New Orleans store couldn’t make its payments, you’d have to, and if you couldn’t, the bank would clean you out.”
“There was no other way—”
“If your bank told you that, it’s a crock,” he interrupted. “Bancroft and Company is an established, profitable corporation. The only time a bank has the right to ask you to personally guarantee a business loan or put up your own holdings as collateral is when you’re an unknown quantity without a decent credit history.” She opened her mouth to object, and Matt forestalled her by raising his hand. “I know they’ll try to get you to sign personally,” he admitted, “they’d love to have fifty cosigners on an ordinary home mortgage if they could get it, because it eliminates their risk. But never, ever agree to sign your name for a Bancroft loan again. Do you think for a damn second that General Motors executives are asked by a lender to sign corporate loans for GM?”
“No, of course not. But our case is a little different.”
“That’s what banks always try to tell you. Who the hell is Bancroft’s banker, anyway?”
“My fiancé . . . Reynolds Mercantile Trust,” she clarified, watching shock and then annoyance chase across his face in the firelight.
“That’s one great deal your fiancé cut for you,” he said sarcastically.
Meredith wondered if that remark came from male competitiveness. “You’re not being reasonable,” she quietly informed him. “There’s something you’re forgetting. There are bank examiners who scrutinize a bank’s loans, and now, with banks failing everywhere, the examiners are frowning on banks getting too heavily invested in any one borrower. Bancroft and Company is in debt to the tune of hundreds of millions to Reynolds Mercantile. Parker couldn’t continue to loan us money, particularly now that he and I are engaged, without bringing down censure on himself—unless we put up enough collateral.”
“There must have been some other form of collateral you could have used as security. What about your stock in the store?”
She chuckled and shook her head. “I’ve already used that, and so has my father. There’s only one major family stockholder in B and C who hasn’t already put her stock up.”
“Who’s that?”
Meredith was already wishing for a way to divert the conversation to another track, and he’d just handed her the opportunity. “My mother.”
“Your mother?”
“I did have one of those, you know,” she reminded him dryly. “She was given a large block of stock as part of the divorce settlement.”
“Why doesn’t your mother put her stock up for the bank? It’s not unreasonable, since she’s going to reap the profits. The value of her stock is going up every day that B and C continues to expand and prosper.”
Laying aside the notepad, Meredith looked at him. “She hasn’t done it because she hasn’t been asked to do it.”
“Would you feel comfortable telling me why not?” Matt asked, hoping she wouldn’t think he was prying instead of trying to help.
“She wasn’t asked because she lives in Italy somewhere, and neither my father nor I have had anything to do with her since I was a year old.” When he heard that without any outward sign of emotion, Meredith suddenly decided to tell him something she normally chose to forget. Watching him for reaction, she said with a smile, “My mother was—is—Caroline Edwards.”
His dark brows drew together into a baffled frown, and she prodded, “Think about an old Cary Grant movie, where he was on the Riviera, and the princess of a mythical kingdom was running away—
”
She knew from his smile exactly when he identified the movie—and its female star. Leaning against the back of the sofa, he regarded her with smiling surprise. “She is your mother?”
Meredith nodded.
In thoughtful silence, Matt compared the elegant perfection of Meredith’s features to the memory he had of the star of the movie. Meredith’s mother had been beautiful, but Meredith was more so. She had a glow that lit her from within and illuminated her expressive eyes; a natural elegance that she hadn’t acquired in some acting school. She had a dainty nose that sculptors would envy, delicate cheekbones, and a romantic mouth that invited a man to kiss it at the same time everything else about her warned a man to keep his distance.
Even if that man was her husband . . .
Matt pushed that thought out of his mind the moment he had it. They were married to each other only by a technicality; in reality, they were strangers. Intimate strangers, the demon in his mind reminded him, and Matt suddenly had to force himself not to look below the bright yellow V at the throat of her sweater. He didn’t need to look. Once he had explored and kissed every inch of the breasts that were now filling out that sweater so provocatively. He still remembered exactly the way they filled his hands, the softness of her skin, the tautness of her nipples, the scent . . . Annoyed with the persistent sexual direction his thoughts were suddenly taking, he tried to tell himself it was merely the natural, appreciative reaction of any male who was confronted by a female who had the alluring ability to look both innocent and seductive in a simple sweater and slacks. Realizing that he’d been looking at her without speaking, he returned to the discussion at hand. “I always wondered where you got that beautiful face of yours—God knows your looks couldn’t have come from your father.”
Shocked by his unprecedented compliment and inordinately pleased that he evidently thought her face beautiful even now, when she was crowding thirty, Meredith acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a slight shrug, because she honestly didn’t know what to say.
“How is it I never knew who your mother is until now?”
“There wasn’t much time to talk before.”
Because we were too busy making love, his mind replied, forcibly reminding him of those hot, endless nights he’d held her in his arms, joining his body to hers, trying to satisfy the need he’d felt to please her and be close to her.
Meredith was finding it surprisingly pleasant to confide in him, and so she told him something else: “Have you ever heard of Seaboard Consolidated Industries?”
Matt mentally sifted through the disjointed names and facts he’d accumulated over the years. “There’s a Seaboard Consolidated somewhere in the southeast—Florida, I think. It’s a holding company that originally owned a couple of large chemical companies and later diversified into mining, aerospace, computer component manufacturing, and chains of drugstores.”
“Supermarkets,” Meredith corrected him with that jaunty sideways smile of hers that used to make him yearn to drag her into his arms and kiss it off her lips. “Seaboard was founded by my grandfather.”
“And now it’s yours?” Matt said, abruptly recalling that a woman supposedly headed Seaboard.
“No, it’s owned by my stepgrandmother and her two sons. My grandfather married his secretary seven years before he died. Later he adopted her two sons, and when he died he left Seaboard to them.”
Matt was impressed. “She must be quite a businesswoman—she’s built Seaboard into a large and very profitable conglomerate.”
Meredith’s dislike of her stepgrandmother prompted her to deny the woman any such undue praise, and in doing so she revealed more than she intended. “Charlotte has expanded it, but the corporation was always very diversified. In fact, Seaboard owned everything the family had acquired for generations, and Bancroft and Company—the department store, I mean—was less than one quarter of its total assets. So you see, it’s not as if she built Seaboard up from nothing.”
Meredith saw Matt’s surprised expression and realized he’d already noted that the division of her grandfather’s estate seemed very off balance. At any other time, she wouldn’t have confided as much as she already had, but there was something special about today. There was the pleasure of sitting across from Matt in quiet friendship after all these years; the warmth of knowing that she was mending a relationship that never should have ended with enmity in the first place; the flattering realization that he seemed to be very interested in whatever she said. All of that, combined with the coziness of a fire crackling in the grate while snow piled up on the windows, created an atmosphere that positively encouraged confidences. Since he’d courteously refrained from prying any further into the matter they’d been discussing, Meredith voluntarily provided the answers. “Charlotte and my father detested each other, and when my grandfather married her, it caused a breach between the two men that never truly healed. Later on—perhaps in retaliation because my father was shunning him, my grandfather legally adopted Charlotte’s sons. We didn’t even know he’d done it until his will was read. He divided his estate into four equal parts, and left one to my father and the rest to Charlotte and her sons, with Charlotte in control of their share, of course.”
“Do I detect a note of cynicism in your voice every time you mention the woman?”
“Probably.”
“Because she got her hands on three quarters of your grandfather’s estate,” Matt speculated, “instead of half of it, which would be more normal?”
Meredith glanced at her watch, realized she needed to do something about dinner, and hurried through the rest of her explanation. “That isn’t why I can’t stand her. Charlotte is the hardest, coldest woman I’ve ever known, and I think she deliberately widened the breach between my father and grandfather. Not that it took much effort on her part,” Meredith concluded with a wry smile. “My father and grandfather were hardheaded and hot-tempered—entirely too much alike to have a nice, peaceful relationship. Once, when they were quarreling about the way my father was running the store, I heard my grandfather shout at my father that the only smart thing my father had ever done in his life was to marry my mother—and then he’d loused that up just like he was lousing up the store.” With an apologetic glance at the clock, she stood up then and said, “It’s gotten late, and you must be hungry. I’ll fix something for dinner.”
Matt realized he was famished, and he stood up too. “Was your father really lousing up the store?” he asked as they walked into the kitchen.
Meredith laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m certain he wasn’t. My grandfather had a weakness for beautiful women. He was crazy about my mother and furious at the time because of the divorce. He’s the one who gave her the block of Bancroft’s stock, actually. He said it served my father right because he’d know that every time the store made one dollar of profit, she was getting a piece of it in dividends.”
“He sounds like a great guy,” Matt said sarcastically.
Meredith’s mind had already shifted to dinner, and she opened the cupboard, trying to decide what he might be able to eat. Matt went straight to the refrigerator and took out the steaks. “How about these?”
“Steaks? Do you feel like eating something that heavy?”
“I think so. I haven’t eaten a full meal in days.” Despite his interest in dinner, Matt was strangely reluctant to end their conversation, perhaps because idle conversation like this between the two of them was such a novel experience. Almost as novel, but not quite as unbelievable, as having her there now, playing the part of a devoted, attentive wife looking after her recuperating husband. As he unwrapped the meat, he watched her standing at his shoulder, tying a towel around her narrow waist for a makeshift apron. Hoping to get her to talk to him again, he made a joking reference to one of the last things she’d said. “Does your father tell you that you’re lousing up the store?”
Taking down the loaf of bread, she gave him a bright sideways smile, but the smile didn’t quite reach
those expressive eyes of hers. “Only when he’s in an unusually good mood.”
Meredith saw sympathy flicker in his eyes, and she immediately endeavored to show him that it wasn’t necessary. “It’s embarrassing when he rants at me in meetings with store executives, but they’re all accustomed to it by now. Besides, all of them have come under fire from him too, though not as often or in the same way I get it. You see, they realize my father is the sort of man who—who hates to be confronted with proof that someone else is perfectly capable of accomplishing something without his advice or interference. He hires competent, knowledgeable people with good ideas, then he bullies them into submitting to his own ideas. If the idea works, he takes the credit; if it fails, they’re his scapegoat. Those who defy him and stick to their guns get promotions and raises if their ideas succeed, but they don’t get thanks or recognition. And they’re in for the same battle the very next time they want to do something innovative.”
“And you,” Matt asked, leaning a shoulder against the wall beside her, “how do you handle things now that you’re running the show?”
Meredith paused in the act of taking silverware from the drawer and looked at him, her thoughts drifting to the meeting he’d held in his office the day she’d gone there. Unfortunately, she was distracted by the sight of his bare chest, which was now at eye level and which was clearly exposed to view by the gaping front of his robe. Looking at all that bronze skin and muscle with its sprinkling of dark curly hairs had an unexpected and disquieting effect on her. With a funny catch in her breath, she lifted her gaze to his and the feeling subsided, but not the intimacy of the moment. “I handle things the way you do,” she said softly, not bothering to hide the admiration she’d felt.
He quirked a dark brow at her. “How do you know how I handle things?”